


Entropy

by noblydonedonnanoble



Category: Doctor Who RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-06
Updated: 2012-06-06
Packaged: 2017-11-07 02:47:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/426078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noblydonedonnanoble/pseuds/noblydonedonnanoble





	Entropy

                Entropy can most concisely be defined as “lack of pattern or organization; disorder”. Science assures us that the universe tends toward entropy. No matter how balanced, no matter how entirely harmonic, it will break itself apart in favor of the basic chaos of nature.

                Things were harmonic, at first. David’s life was solid. No complaints from him. He was an actor. His life was pretty glamorous, comparatively, and while he knew it he didn’t really _know_ it. Balance has a very tangible feel, and when people regarded David’s life with outside eyes, they felt it.

                Catherine was the inevitable entropic force. To people who didn’t know her well, she seemed entirely chaotic. When it came down to it, David was the only one who seemed to understand that she wasn’t the chaotic person she showed to the world; she had a subtlety to her that only David ever saw. If anything, he saw the opposite; from the beginning, he could tell that she was desperate to seem like everything she thought she wasn’t.

                Sometimes that actually showed who she really was and sometimes it didn’t. Such a mish-mosh of traits would, of course, seem unusual.

                Perhaps because she saw that hiding from David would be relatively impossible, Catherine and David quickly became close in a way both of them had thought unimaginable. There was nothing romantic about the way they looked at each other, but they grew to understand one another at a level that a couple married for fifty years could only hope to reach. This is logical, of course—married couples fight, have disagreements that lead to slamming doors and cautious words for weeks. If David and Catherine were married, or saw it as even a remote possibility, they would have probably censored themselves. Rather than saying their deepest thoughts, they would remember the forever that they had promised, or might promise. And some secrets shouldn’t hang in the air forever.

                Eventually, David got married. And he was happy, because she made him smile and she was beautiful and he could imagine living the rest of his life with her.

                Meanwhile, David confided in Catherine and when he had those fights that prevented an extreme level of closeness, he occasionally slept on Catherine’s couch or got her to come out with him while he got drunk—though she never drank herself.

                And suddenly Catherine did not only seem like chaos to those who stood around her, but she _became_ chaos. Even though she and David were friends, people started to consider those nights he went into her house and those mornings he came out. People thought of the way they seemed so comfortable around each other. People started asking questions.

                Maybe those questions existed before, and they had just stayed off David and Catherine’s radar. But it mattered now. It mattered because of the ring on David’s finger.

                Sometimes those nights on Catherine’s couch led to fights. Which led to more nights, and more fights.

                Catherine told him that as long as he knew he was devoted to his wife, it didn’t matter what anyone else saw.

                Sometimes David thought about how easy his life would be if he had fallen in love with Catherine and married her. Even though if she was his wife, the inevitable problems that come from being married and in such close proximity would have arisen in some form or another and he’d simply wish that they had remained friends.

                That didn’t stop him from imagining it. He tuned out the world, imagining a peaceful life absent of all of his current stresses. Catherine was there. Of course she was. He literally was incapable of imagining a life without her.

                And that, really, was the center of the problem. Because while he could imagine spending the rest of his life with his wife, he could _only_ imagine a future that contained Catherine, if only for balance’s sake.

                 One night, after a particularly immense fight that resulted in David shouting himself hoarse, he actually grabbed clothes for the next day and stormed out. It was the first time he had made it so clear that he was _not_ coming back that night.

                He found himself standing on Catherine’s doorstep with such a strange, chaotic energy passing through him. It was that energy that drove him to collapse in her arms. It was that energy that drove him to kiss her.

                Catherine was the force that pulled him away from… well, everything, really. When David got into bed with her, it was not a conscious decision to have any sort of an affair. It did not happen because they were in love. It happened because Catherine had always been there, tugging—not specifically in a romantic way, but in every way imaginable.

                In nature, entropy _is_. Catherine was David’s entropy.

                Their ending is neither happy nor sad. Eventually, David gets divorced, but not because of Catherine. She never gets married.

                David doesn’t ever have to imagine life without her.

                Sometimes they wonder what their life would have been like. If they’d fallen in love. If he never got married. If people’s suspicions about them had been right from the beginning.

                It wouldn’t have worked. They would have lost one another. Because while Catherine was everything David wanted in his life, while he understood her in phenomenal, unimagined ways, she was chaos.

                They grow old together, but they don’t grow old _together_.

                David likes to think that they denied the world one of its greatest love stories.


End file.
